WIT TEA

Is Everyone Else Here Also Thinking about Desire

By SUSAN NGUYEN  |  26 NOV 2025

The truth is I hate running but I thought after a decade away, I could return to Virginia as someone different.

We keep opening our bird ID’ing app, arms outstretched. Eavesdropping: the dark-eyed warbler, a gold melody racing through the trees.

My problem (one of them) is that I want to be ensnared. But I want someone as ensnared with me as I am with a shade of blue, the blurred movement in a photograph. Or the language of—that’s it. Language. Its rope tightening. Plaited slip knot around my wrist.

Ask me again tomorrow and everything will be different.

Another theory: I don’t know how to stop my body from constantly arriving before me.

In younger pictures, what I notice most is that I am not as ugly or unlovable as I thought I was. Idiot bitch, I think.

I am reacquainting myself with how to read music. Little birds on the wire, darting in the thistle. I try to follow but my fingers land on the wrong notes.

I keep kissing the same people: tall Scorpios.

Is that supposed to mean anything? my best friend asks.

Something happens at the end of your 20s and start of your 30s. You begin looking up again.

I started the new year with two words shining on my tongue: pleasure and abundance.

It was all downhill from there: I ran for 10 minutes, my lungs singing. My life did not change undeniably. I thought it would mean more, my shallow breath snagged in the grass. I fail to translate language into action.

Who I want to be is good.

This morning I am jealous of the artist who is tall enough to see into the nest above his door. I keep wanting to be a part of any miracle that isn’t mine.

I can’t help it.

Someone told me fervor migrates beyond the body.

Hope arrives when I meet a musician who swears he cannot sight read either. They all say that—all play songs by ear. My foot flutters above the pedal.

I don’t know how to practice detachment but why should I?

I like listening to the birds. I can’t see most of the ones that pop up on my phone, but I like to know they’re there—somewhere in the trees: a blue-winged song.

I am failing to write a 5-line poem for one of the Scorpios. My words run on without me.

Another theory: I want to be happy wherever I am but I’m not sure where that is.

Everyone here lives in New York. I don’t. That’s the first place a bird shit on me. The Scorpio says it’s okay to walk slow as long as you don’t stop. But what if you get lost? Everyone tells me the city is a grid, but they underestimate my dumbness, which is stupid or nice.

When birds fly to the fence, I look for their tufted bellies. Try to count their feathers like I do whole notes and half notes: slowly and miraculously.

Language spreads its wings. Just there, I was thinking desire but I am starting to bore even myself. Inside me: a sharp note plays. My ruby-throated name.

Susan Nguyen’s debut poetry collection Dear Diaspora won the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, POETRY, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, Tin House, and others. Her poem "Impossible Deer" won the 2022 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review and she is the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and elsewhere. She is the editor in chief of Hayden’s Ferry Review and a member of the She Who Has No Master(s) collective.

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